The peasant question in modern capitalist states most
frequently gives rise to perplexity and vacillation among Marxists and to
most of the attacks on Marxism by bourgeois (professorial) political
economy.

Petty production in agriculture is doomed to extinction and to an
incredibly abased and downtrodden position under capitalism, say the
Marxists. Petty production is dependent on big capital, is backward in
comparison with large-scale production in agriculture, and can only keep
going by means of desperately reduced consumption and laborious, arduous
toil. The frittering away and waste of human labour, the worst forms of
dependence of the producer, exhaustion of the peasant’s family, his cattle
and his land—this is what capitalism everywhere brings the peasant.

There is no salvation for the peasant except by joining in the
activities of the proletariat, primarily those of the wage-workers.

Bourgeois political economy, and the Narodniks and opportunists who
champion it (though they may not always be conscious of the fact), on the
contrary, try to prove that petty production is viable and is more
profitable than large-scale production. The peasant, who has a firm and
assured position in capitalist society, must gravitate, not towards the
proletariat, but towards the bourgeoisie; be must not gravitate towards the
class struggle of the wage-workers but must try to strengthen his position
as a proprietor and master—such, in substance, is the theory of the
bourgeois economists.

We will try to test the soundness of the proletarian and bourgeois
theories by means of precise data. Let us take the data on female
labour in agriculture in Austria and Germany. Full data for Russia are
still lacking because the
government is unwilling to take a scientifically based census of all
agricultural enterprises.

In Austria, according to the census of 1902, out of 9,070,682 persons
employed in agriculture 4,422,981, or 48.7 per cent, were women. In
Germany, where capitalism is far more developed, women constitute the
majority of those employed in agriculture—54.8 per cent. The
more capitalism develops in agriculture the more it employs female labour,
that is to say, worsens the living conditions of the working
masses. Women employed in German industry make up 25 per cent of the total
labour force, but in agriculture they constitute more than 50
per cent. This shows that industry is absorbing the best labour
and leaving the weaker to agriculture.

In developed capitalist countries agriculture has already become mainly
a women’s occupation.

But if we examine statistics on farms of various sizes we shall see
that it is in petty production that the exploitation of female
labour assumes particularly large proportions. On the other hand, even in
agriculture, large-scale capitalist production employs mainly male labour,
although in this respect it has not caught up with industry.

In both countries we see the operation of the same law of capitalist
agriculture. The smaller the scale of production the poorer is the
composition of the labour force, and the greater the number of women among
the total number of persons employed in agriculture.

The general situation under capitalism is the following. On proletarian
farms, i.e., those whose “proprietors” live mainly by means of
wage-labour (agricultural labourers, day-labourers, and wage-workers in
general who possess a tiny plot of land), female labour predominates
over male labour, sometimes to an enormous extent.

It must not be forgotten that the number of these proletarian or
labourer farms is enormous: in Austria they amount to 1,300,000 out of a
total of 2,800,000 farms, and in Germany there are even 3,400,000 out of a
total of 5,700,000.

On peasant farms male and female labour is employed in nearly equal
proportions.

It signifies that the composition of the labour force in petty
production is inferior to that in large-scale capitalist production.

It signifies that in agriculture the working woman—the proletarian
woman and peasant woman—must exert herself ever so much more, must strain
herself to the utmost, must toil at her work to the detriment of her health
and the health of her children, in order to keep up as far as possible with
the male worker in large-scale capitalist production.

It signifies that petty production keeps going under capitalism only by
squeezing out of the worker a larger amount of work than
is squeezed out of the worker in large-scale production.

The peasant is more tied up, more entangled in the complicated net of
capitalist dependence than the wage-worker. He thinks he is independent,
that he can “make good”; but as a matter of fact, in order to keep going,
he must work (for capital) harder than the wage-worker.

The figures on child labour in agriculture prove this still
more
clearly.[2]